Sept. 11 Museum To Re-Open On 9/11 Anniversary

NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly six months after the coronavirus forced its closure, the 9/11 Memorial Museum will be reopening on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks next month, first to those who lost loved ones and then to the general public, museum officials announced Thursday.

The memorial plaza had been open to the public with social distancing restrictions since early July, but the museum remained closed, as did other cultural institutions. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week that museums would be allowed to reopen with restrictions starting later this month.

“We are extremely pleased to announce the reopening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, a physical testament to the triumph of hope and our potential for resilience in the face of adversity and unfathomable loss,” said Alice Greenwald, the 9/11 museum’s president and CEO.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service announced Thursday that the museums on Liberty and Ellis islands will reopen Monday at 25% of their normal crowd capacity, though the Statue of Liberty’s interior and some parts of the museums will remain closed.

At the 9/11 museum, the anniversary day reopening will be reserved for families of those killed in the 2001 attack and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The public will be able to visit starting Sept. 12.

Pandemic restrictions will be in effect, such as a limit of 25% of capacity, and a requirement to wear masks. The museum had always mandated visitors to get timed entry tickets in advance, which will continue now.

The museum said other measures had been implemented, such as Plexiglas dividers and hand-sanitizing stations, as well as temperature screenings for all, and a one-direction path through the facility.

Hours at the museum are being restricted to five days a week, from the seven days it had been opened before its shutdown in mid-March. The museum will now be closed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Some exhibition spaces will remain closed to the public, and some services like coat check will not be available.

September 11 Museum Opening To The Public May 21st.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, left, Chairman of the Sept. 11 Museum, with museum President Joe Daniels, addresses a news conference in the venue, in New York, Wednesday, May 14, 2014. Leaders of the soon-to-open Sept. 11 museum are portraying it as a monument to unity and resilience. (AP Photo)

 (AP) - The museum devoted to the story of Sept. 11 tells it in victims' last voicemails, in photos of people falling from the twin towers, in the scream of sirens, in the dust-covered shoes of those who fled the skyscrapers' collapse, in the wristwatch of one of the airline passengers who confronted the hijackers.

By turns chilling and heartbreaking, a place of both deathly silence and distressing sounds, the National September 11 Memorial Museum opens this week deep beneath ground zero, 12½ years after the terrorist attacks.

The project was marked by construction problems, financial squabbles and disputes over the appropriate way to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed in New York, Washington and the Pennsylvania countryside.

Whatever the challenges in conceiving it, "you won't walk out of this museum without a feeling that you understand humanity in a deeper way. And for a museum, if we can achieve that objective, we've done our job," museum President Joe Daniels said Wednesday.

The privately operated museum - built along with the memorial plaza above for $700 million in private donations and tax dollars - will be dedicated Thursday with a visit from President Barack Obama and will be open initially to victims' families, survivors and first responders. It will open to the public May 21.

Charles G. Wolf, who lost his wife, Katherine, planned to be at the ceremonial opening.

"I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and I'm dreading tomorrow," he said Wednesday. "It brings everything up."

Visitors start in an airy pavilion where the rusted tops of two of the World Trade Center's trident-shaped columns shoot upward. From there, stairs and ramps lead visitors on an unsettling journey into 9/11.

First, a dark corridor is filled with the voices of people remembering the day. Then visitors find themselves looking over a cavernous space, 70 feet below ground, at the last steel column removed during the ground zero cleanup - a totem covered with the numbers of police precincts and firehouses and other messages.

Descend farther - past the battered "survivors' staircase" that hundreds used to escape the burning towers - and there are such artifacts as a mangled piece of the antenna from atop the trade center and a fire truck with its cab shorn off.

And then, through a revolving door, visitors are plunged into the chaos of Sept. 11: fragments of planes, a teddy bear left at the impromptu memorials that arose after the attacks, the sounds of emergency radio transmissions and office workers calling loved ones.

"We wanted a very gradual, quiet descent, for that connection to actually emerge," said Carl Krebs, an architect on the project.

The project recently faced objections about how Muslims are depicted in a documentary film, and complaints from some victims' relatives about the decision to place unidentified remains behind a wall at the site.

"I'm still processing" the impact of seeing the museum, said Anthony Garner, who lost his brother Harvey on 9/11 and visited on Wednesday. He said it will show visitors "that they're in a very sacred place and a very historic place.

Museum Dedicated To 9/11 Victims To Open May 21

Contributed by Karen Matthews, AP

FILE - In this Sept. 6, 2013, file photo, a visitor to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum takes in the sight as he walks past the museum in New York. The long-awaited museum dedicated to the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks will open to the public at the World Trade Center site on May 21, officials announced Monday, March 24, 2014. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

 A long-awaited museum dedicated to the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks will open to the public at the World Trade Center site on May 21, officials announced Monday.

The opening will follow a May 15 ceremony and a six-day dedication period during which the museum will be open around the clock for 9/11 family members, rescue and recovery workers and others directly affected by the 2001 attacks, said Joe Daniels, president of the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

"We want to make sure that our doors are open for them to see it before the public does," Daniels said.

The museum includes two core exhibitions at the foundation of the trade center complex.

One of them, called "In Memoriam," pays tribute to the 2,983 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as well as the six people killed in a truck bombing at the trade center on February 26, 1993. The other, a three-part historical exhibition, tells the story of Sept. 11 and explores what led to the terrorist strikes.

The museum's regular hours will be 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.

"This is a major milestone," Daniels said. "It's just a very real marker of the rebirth of the World Trade Center."

Planners had originally hoped that the museum could open in 2011, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. Construction delays were made worse by flooding caused by Superstorm Sandy and by a funding dispute with the site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, stopping all work for nearly a year.

The planned ticket price of $24 has angered some Sept. 11 family members.

Retired Deputy Fire Chief Jim Riches and Sally Regenhard, each of whom lost firefighter sons in the attacks, complained earlier this year that the museum "was never intended to be a revenue-generating tourist attraction with a prohibitive budget and entrance fee." Museum officials defend the planned ticket price, saying the museum's operations are privately funded.

Daniels said there will be no admission charge for relatives of Sept. 11 victims or for rescue and recovery workers. Children age 6 and younger will get in free, and admission will be free for everyone on Tuesdays from 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.

There will continue to be no charge to enter the World Trade Center memorial plaza, which is already open. About 5.3 million people visited the plaza last year to see the two huge fountains that sit in the original footprints of the twin towers.